The syringe has been around since the 9th century, thanks to the Iraqi/Egyptian physician Ammar ibn 'Ali al-Mawsili', though he used it exclusively to remove cataracts from the eyes of his patients. Intravenous injection using syringes didn't come into vogue until the mid 1700s. Likewise, the first high-pressure jet injectors were not intended to deliver drugs - they were grease guns or components of diesel engines, and their accidental application to human bodies was anything but painless.

The Ped-O-Jet, a foot-powered jet injection vaccinator.

In 1960 the medical jet-injector, the Ped-O-Jet, was developed for vaccination against smallpox - predating Star Trek's hypospray by several years. Not exactly painless, but invaluable for quick, mass-injections or vaccinations. The "Ped" referred to the power supply - a foot-powered pump. Its reusable tip made is less expensive, but led to concerns that infections could be passed from one patient to subsequent patients. More compact improvements like the Jtip, Biojector, or PenJet make it possible to self-administer flu vaccines and migraine medication.

Needle or no, shooting liquids into your flesh at high speed is not guaranteed to be painless, and some users complain of bruising and soreness. The MicroJet uses a piezoelectric actuator to repeatedly deliver more precisely controlled volumes of liquid. The very thin streams of liquid produced by the MicroJet reduce the area of skin affected by the injection and (with a little luck and the right settings) reduce pain.

A MicroJet in action.

When a drug can penetrate the skin or mucous membranes on its lonesome, an inhaler or topical application of the drug in a cream or a transdermal patch will do. Topical applications are painless, but not every pharmaceutical can penetrate the skin without help. The SonoPrep uses ultrasound to permeabilize an area of skin, making it temporarily possible for drugs to seep through skin that would typically block it from entry.

Microelectricalmechanical systems (MEMS) devices are another alternative. Instead of one big injection, why not lots of tiny ones? Microneedle devices look and feel like a patch, but they actually consist of hundreds of microneedles that can be programmed to deliver drugs steadily and painlessly.

Lilliputian microneedle jabs.

NanoPumps deliver insulin slowly enough that large-scale injections are unnecessary, regulating blood insulin levels with steady, constant flow.

An insulin NanoPump.

While many of these drug delivery methods are far less painful than a needle stick, I love a challenge - how about a pleasurable drug delivery method? Look no further than edible vaccines produced by genetically modified food. No matter how picky an eater you are, it's preferable to an injection.

Do you have questions you've always wanted to ask a biogeek? You can email me.

If you've had cancer, or been diagnosed with cancer, you are eligible to participate. Says the call for volunteers:

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University are seeking volunteers with a current or past diagnosis of cancer who have some anxiety or are feeling down about their cancer to participate in a scientific study of self-exploration and personal meaning brought about by the entheogen psilocybin, a psychoactive substance found in mushrooms used as a sacrament in some cultures, given in a comfortable, supportive setting. Questionnaires and interviews will be used to assess the effects of the substance on consciousness, mood, and behavior.

Volunteers enrolled in the study will receive careful preparation and 2 sessions in which they will receive psilocybin. Structured guidance will be provided during the session and afterwards to facilitate integration of the experiences. The study complies with FDA regulations.

Volunteer must be between the ages of 21 and 70, have no personal history of severe psychiatric illness, or recent history of alcoholism or drug abuse, have someone willing to pick them up and drive them home at the end of the two psilocybin sessions (around 5:00 PM).

I love science.

If you want to find out more about study, or are interested in volunteering, visit the call for volunteers website.

The plot of this Ken Russell joint, such as it is, involves a series of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde style experiments where Hurt wants to explore alternate psychological states. There is a whole subplot involving religious epiphanies and native people and Hurt trying to deal with being married. Luckily most of the subplots come during his hallucination sequences, and also include him killing a goat with like 100 eyes on it. When he's not hallucinating, he's running around telling everybody incoherent, hippie-ish things about consciousness.

Eventually, he de-evolves into a primordial ooze and realizes that he does want to stay with his wife, even if she's not as hot as that student he was banging when he became homo-erectus in this clip. Oops, I gave away the ending. [Altered States via IMDB]

The drug BCI-540 was originally an Alzheimer's drug, and BrainCells' CEO James Schoeneck says the company would mostly market it for helping people with degenerative diseases get their minds back in working order. It could work well as an anti-depressant as well. But in animals tests, BCI-632 has so far shown an ability to enhance memory functions in healthy lab rats. The company hopes to begin trials on people some time next year. Sounds to me like a great opportunity to be a guinea pig.

Source: Technology Review, Image: Omnispace.org

Here are all the works of science fiction (so far) which have featured a drug named Rapture:

Odyssey 5

In the episode "Rapture," a scuzzy teenager named Justin Deckard manages to get a formula for a super-drug from the alien Sentients, who live on the Internet (sort of.) The drug links everyone who uses it telepathically, into a sort of gestalt, and gives you psionic powers that let you give other people nosebleeds and eyebleeds. Justin wants to use it to turn all his "friends" into a "hard drive" to give his own brain extra processing power. But it ends up making weird veins splotch out on his face, and then he has a druggy freakout and drives off a cliff. See clip above for how awesome a Rapture rave can be.

Spider-Man 2099:

Miguel O'Hara wants to quit his job at Alchemax, the evil company in the year 2099. But his boss (and secretly his dad) Tyler Stone doesn't want him to quit — so at Miguel's farewell dinner, Tyler spikes his drink with Rapture, a drug that bonds with your DNA to make you addicted for life. I forget exactly what the high from Rapture looks like, but it didn't seem that fun when I read this comic a decade ago — just sort of trippy. In any case, Alchemax is the only supplier of Rapture, so Miguel has to stay working for them or suffer horrible, unending withdrawal pains. Miguel instead decides to restore his DNA from a stored version, but his DNA gets mixed with spider DNA — turning him into Spider-Man.

Sagramanda by Alan Dean Foster:

In the not-too-distant future, Sagramanda is an Indian city of 100 million people — and it's plagued by a serial killer named Jena Chalmette, who is high on the drug Rapture-4. Writes Foster: "It sharply enhanced her emotions and heightened her perceptions. She believed it also altered the reality around her." It's also referred to as "Full-on Shakti," and Foster mentions that it causes visions.

City of Heroes

This happy MMORPG was terrorized by a new designer drug named Rapture that made its users "moody" and even more violent than usual. The drug also gives users greater strength and endurance and changes their body chemistry for some unknown, yet sinister, purpose. MAGI Investigators finally tracked down a drug lab in Skyway City, where it turned out "renegade Trolls" had been manufacturing the drug. The drug is a derivative of another substance known as Rapture X. Dood!

Violent New Breed (1996)

This is sort of a horror/fantasy movie, except that it's set in a dystopian future, and the demons in the film are dabbling in pharmacology. Says IMBD:

Demons have invaded the streets with a drug called Rapture (the ultimate high) that has half the human population hooked. I found this social commentary very refreshing and honest, as opposed to other films about addiction where we are asked over and over again to feel sorry for the addict. The drug is used to cloud their minds so the demons can use them as slaves and can use the women as vessels to impregnate and carry more demons, only these are half-breeds - demon and human mixed. Thus creating a "new breed" to control the planet.

"Into The Black" by Ally Blue

A gritty slash fic story set in a dystopian space colony. A gangster's mistress has been cheated of ten grams of the awesome drug Rapture, and there will be hell to pay. So what does the drug do? Not sure. Here's the description: "Rapture was horribly addictive and expensive, but was nevertheless wildly popular on the space stations orbiting the Outer Planets, where the air reeked of tight-packed humanity and despair and everyone wanted an escape, however temporary."

The real-life drug

And finally, there's a dietary supplement known as Piperazine — but the street name is Rapture. It causes psychotic episodes in some people who are unlucky enough to try it. It's a stimulant, but even when it works properly it's not that great, according to one guy who tried it:

I chose Rapture, which promised me "an intense mind and body sensory experience". Starting with one pill (just in case my head imploded, or a giant ringworm shot out of my stomach), I began a merry game of Circle Of Death. After about an hour I was still yawning and didn't feel much like going out. So I had another pill. One whole hour later there was still no effect, so I took the last of my recommended dose... At first I thought the pills were utter crap, as I yawned my way into the Outback (I'd had a long drive that day), but after a backdraft and some cheap chocolate mudshakes I realized that I was actually getting drunk backwards. I know that makes no sense.

Basically, instead of the whole world spinning and everything becoming a blur, with me feeling like the only one standing straight, the world sat perfectly still and clear - a little too clear - and I felt myself moving.

Greatest drug in the universe.... or kind of a crappy high? That seems to be the one thing all of these versions have in common. Oh, and there's also this wacky satirical piece about British priests selling a drug called Rapture to convert new believers to their dwindling flocks.

For every 1,000 litres of alcohol sold in stores (there were no stats for what got sold in bars), numbers of violent assaults and deaths nearby increased by 13%. For young people, the risk increased by 21%. One could easily imagine a dystopian future where cities zone certain "undesirable" areas for more liquor stores, as a way of trimming down or crippling the population there.

What's particularly interesting about this study is how the researchers got their data. The Canadian province Ontario does an very accurate job of tracking alcohol sales in stores (not bars) because the government regulates stores that sell liquor. In addition, hospitals in the province keep highly-accurate records of assaults. So the region was basically a goldmine for data about how alcohol sales might impact assaults.

Alcohol Sales and Risk of Assault [PLoS Medicine]

McGill anesthesiologist Thomas M. Hemmerling, who helped develop McSleepy, says:

We have been working on closed-loop systems, where drugs are administered, their effects continuously monitored, and the doses are adjusted accordingly, for the last five years. Think of "McSleepy" as a sort of humanoid anesthesiologist that thinks like an anesthesiologist, analyses biological information and constantly adapts its own behavior, even recognizing monitoring malfunction.

I still can't decide if I'd feel safer or less safe with a robot monitoring my anesthesia. At least it wouldn't fall prey to human error — only to operating system crashes.

McGill News via The Biotech Weblog

A release from the University of Illinois explains:

Erythromycin and newer macrolide antibiotics azithromycin and clarithromycin are often used to treat respiratory tract infections, as well as outbreaks of syphilis, acne and gonorrhea. The drugs can be used by patients allergic to penicillin.

Macrolide antibiotics act upon the ribosomes, the protein-synthesizing factories of the cell. A newly-made protein exits the ribosome through a tunnel that spans the ribosome body. Antibiotics can ward off an infection by attaching to the ribosome and preventing proteins the bacterium needs from moving through the tunnel.

Some bacteria have learned how to sense the presence of the antibiotic in the ribosomal tunnel, and in response, switch on genes that make them resistant to the drug, Mankin said. The phenomenon of inducible antibiotic expression was known decades ago, but the molecular mechanism was unknown.

Mankin and his team of researchers — Nora Vazquez-Laslop, assistant professor in the Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, and undergraduate student Celine Thum — used new biochemical and genetic techniques to work out the details of its operation.

"Combining biochemical data with the knowledge of the structure of the ribosome tunnel, we were able to identify some of the key molecular players involved in the induction mechanism," said Vazquez-Laslop.

"We only researched response to erythromycin-like drugs because the majority of the genetics were already known," she said. "There may be other antibiotics and resistance genes in pathogenic bacteria regulated by this same mechanism. This is just the beginning."

Christensen writes:

Science fiction fans might consider this to be a commercial business use of the RePet technology used in the film The Sixth Day. The cloning research and work was done by a team of Seoul National University scientists led by Professor Lee Byeong-chun. Now, if only they could master syncording, which is the fictional technology in The Sixth Day that assured that your new RePet was behaviorally identical to your old pet, they wouldn't even need to train them!

Given the black market in imitation pharmaceuticals, it might also be useful to have a dog that could sniff out cloned drugs, too. Imagine a dog that could tell the difference between Pfizer's Viagra, and Bob's black market V1agr@.

Korean Cloned Drug-Sniffing Dogs [Technovelgy]

According to a release from the Brookhaven National Lab:

Salvia is legal in most states, but is grabbing the attention of municipal lawmakers. Numerous states have placed controls on salvia or salvinorin A - the plant's active component - and others, including New York, are considering restrictions.

"This is probably one of the most potent hallucinogens known," said Brookhaven chemist Jacob Hooker, the lead author of the study, which is the first to look at how the drug travels through the brain. "It's really important that we study drugs like salvia and how they affect the brain in order to understand why they are abused and to investigate their medicinal relevance, both of which can inform policy makers."

Hooker and fellow researchers used positron emission tomography, or PET scanning, to watch the distribution of salvinorin A in the brains of anesthetized primates. In this technique, the scientists administer a radioactively labeled form of salvinorin A (at concentrations far below pharmacologically active doses) and use the PET scanner to track its site-specific concentrations in various brain regions.

Within 40 seconds of administration, the researchers found a peak concentration of salvinorin A in the brain - nearly 10 times faster than the rate at which cocaine enters the brain. About 16 minutes later, the drug was essentially gone. This pattern parallels the effects described by human users, who experience an almost immediate high that starts fading away within 5 to 10 minutes.

High concentrations of the drug were localized to the cerebellum and visual cortex, which are parts of the brain responsible for motor function and vision, respectively. Based on their results and published data from human use, the scientists estimate that just 10 micrograms of salvia in the brain is needed to cause psychoactive effects in humans . . .

The drug targets a receptor that is known to modulate pain and could be important for therapies as far reaching as mood disorders . . . The scientists also hope to develop radioactive tracers that can better probe the brain receptors to which salvia binds. Such studies could possibly lead to therapies for chronic pain and mood disorders.

Brookhaven Scientists Explore Brain's Reaction to Potent Hallucinogen [Brookhaven Today]

Four-fifths of all respondents in the Nature poll (not just the pill-poppers) thought people should be allowed to take these pills if they wanted to.

It's interesting to compare these results with those from an annual study done by the National Coffee Association, which reports that 1 in 5 people in the U.S. drinks espresso drinks. They also have a fascinating chart, similar to the chart done for the Nature study, showing what percentage of people drank coffee the day before the survey, and breaking down the answers by age. You can see that recreational coffee use is rampant — up to 70 percent of people drank coffee within the last 24 hours in 2007.

And yet coffee is a crappier stimulant than Ritalin or Provigil, with lots of bad side-effects. So the lesson here? Scientists get the good shit, and the rest of us are left clutching a shakes-inducing mug of Starbucks. Charts via Nature and the National Coffee Association.

Poll Results: Look Who's Doping [Nature]

Killers From Space is pretty much the zaniest classic scifi movie not to be subject to MST3K treatment. Directed by W. Lee Wilder, brother of Billy Wilder, it features aliens who kidnap a U.S. scientist and brainwash him into helping with their invasion plans. But then he regains control over his faculties after this whole truth serum incident, and manages to destroy the aliens by disrupting their power supply. You can watch the whole thing online for free at the Prelinger Archive. [Archive.org]

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Ali Salahpour and colleagues explored the impact of DAT levels on the response to amphetamines—a group of addictive chemicals closely tied with dopamine sensitivity. Amphetamines are used legally to treat ADHD, narcolepsy, and to suppress appetite, but are well-known as illicit "club" drugs and performance enhancers. To investigate the consequence of high DAT levels, the researchers developed transgenic mice with three-fold higher levels of DAT compared with unmodified animals. The authors discovered that the drug was more powerful in animals with more DAT. The dopamine-enhanced animals were more sensitive to the effects of amphetamines, becoming hyperactive and more rewarded by the drug, according to the authors.

Increased Amphetamine-Induced Hyperactivity [PNAS]

According to the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog:

The American College of Physicians, 124,000 members strong, has issued a 13-page position paper asking the federal government to drop marijuana from its classification as a substance considered to have no medicinal value and a high chance of abuse . . . "They've said essentially that the federal government has it all wrong," Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, [says].

There's a natural crossover between druggies and science fiction fans, writes Robert Silverberg, author of Son Of Man:

Surveys have shown that the audience for science fiction is primarily adolescent and above average in intelligence; most of the readers are between 15 and 25 years of age (though of course some remain addicts of the genre throughout their lives.) Therefore, there is great correspondence between the main drug-using and science-fiction-reading segments of the population.

So no doubt all this talking has made you wish you were doing drugs right now. So you tell us. If science fictional drugs were real, which one would you want to take?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Cyanide kills by preventing cells from using oxygen — essentially asphyxiating you at the cellular level. Usually it causes death very quickly. But humans are naturally a bit immune to cyanide's effects, which is why we are able to eat pitted fruits like peaches which contain small traces of the toxin. Nagasawa's fast-acting cure for cyanide floods the body with the detoxifying substances that it would naturally use when helping you digest a peach.

Once this cyanide antidote hits the market, people can walk into a room full of cyanide gas without falling into a coma and dying. Combine this with the new cloaking material discovered a few days ago, and you've got an invisible, invincible human.

Fast-acting cyanide antidote [Eurekalert]

Concentration-enabler Provigil remains the favored drug among scientists, while professional poker players prefer ADHD drug Adderall for sharpening attention. Another ADHD drug, Ritalin, is also tops among poker players and college students. And apparently a recent survey revealed that up to a quarter of flute players in symphonies use beta-blockers like Inderal to prevent stage fright from giving them "rubber fingers" that could throw off an entire performance. And yet nobody is calling for a ban on scientific breakthroughs made under the influence of drugs, or to disqualify flutists who take fear-stopping drugs.

Just remember, Adderall, Ritalin, Provigil and Inderal are all available as prescription drugs. And so far, you won't get your patents revoked for discovering shit under the influence. Time to stock up!
Mind Doping [LA Times]

Two neuroscience experts interviewed in Nature, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir, talked about mind performance-enhancing drugs for healthy people who aren't suffering from disorders like ADHD or Alzheimers. They say:

In academia, we know that a number of our scientific colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom already use modafinil to counteract the effects of jetlag, to enhance productivity or mental energy, or to deal with demanding and important intellectual challenges.

And, apparently, so are professors.

Professor's little helper [Nature Commentary]

In Ken MacLeod's novel Newton's Wake, characters can get a sexual orientation modification if they want to, using various post-human technologies. Often, it's just considered the polite thing to do.

And orientation-bending drugs are a staple of scifi erotica. The short story "Blue" [nsfw] is a classic example. An undercover cop takes a mysterious drug called "blue" that makes her want to fuck anything that moves — including a nice lady porn star.

Our favorite moment in gay-making drugs, however, was an article that appeared in New Scientist several years ago about how sperm is an anti-depressant. In one of those head-clutching moments of scientists talking about shit they know nothing about, the researcher involved in the study, Gordon Gallup, said:

I understand that among some gay males who have anal intercourse, it is not uncommon to attempt to retain the semen for extended periods of time. Suggesting, of course, that there may be psychological effects.

Pfizer Gives Last Rites to Exubera [via WSJ]